A Lost Letter
by aethershine
Summary: John Preston receives some insight into the nature of his character from his late wife.


My Dearest John,

You laugh sometimes in your sleep. It isn't a full laugh, more like you just found something amusing. More often you seem disturbed, making quick jerking movements and soft moans. Once you actually yelled out the word, "no!" And one night, a night that almost broke my heart, you reached across the bed for me, took hold of my hand and held it to your chest. You murmured a few words that I couldn't understand and then sighed. You were quiet the rest of that night, but I did not sleep at all. I just lay there feeling the rise and fall of your breathing, the warmth of your hand on top of mine. The next morning I carefully searched your eyes for some recognition of what had happened, but it simply wasn't there.

Intuitive. That is what they call you. An intuitive grammaton cleric. I find it interesting that an organization whose sole purpose it is to wipe out human emotion would permit an intuitive individual to be a cleric. After all, in order to be intuitive, one must be able to feel. Feeling is as essential to intuition as eyesight is to seeing. And you do feel John, you just are not aware of it. It is buried very deeply under the fog of Prozium, as well as a lifetime of unconscious behavioral adjustments. It is necessary both for your survival in this society and your acceptance of yourself that your feelings be undetectable. But I see it.

When we were paired, I had a vague sensation that you were an agreeable man. The "feeling" that I most strongly associated with you was that of safety. I knew that you would be successful, providing a stable life for us and eventually our children. I had no romantic attachment to you, and I cannot remember that there was much about your personality that made an impression, other than your utter dependability.

It was not until they gave us Robbie that I noticed anything unusual about you. Robbie was a fussy baby, which is not atypical for newborns while their Prozium dose is being adjusted. The first few days that he was with us he cried almost constantly. I suggested that we return him to the Department of Reproduction for reprocessing and you just looked at me. There was not a trace of emotion on your face and yet something was happening behind your eyes. You suggested that we wait a few more days. Over the course of the next several days I observed you in the nursery, standing next to Robbie's crib with your hand on his back. When you did this he would sleep.

Eventually Robbie adjusted to his dose. When he did, you did something that I hadn't known you to do before. You went to Equilibrium and had your dose increased. For a long time I thought that the two events were unrelated, that in fact it had something to do with your work at the Tetragrammaton. But then it happened again when they gave us Lisa. It occurred to me that this was very strange behavior, and I seriously thought about speaking with someone about it.

But then something happened that changed everything for me. My sister Erica's son was taken away for sense offense and incinerated. He was eleven. Then it happened to her daughter. She was nine. I became ill. I remember being in bed for three days. We thought it was the flu. I still took my doses. But something had changed. I became obsessed with the fact that I had wanted to send Robbie back for reprocessing. For extermination! What kind of a mother was I? Looking back now, I see that I had always emoted on some level, and I suspect that most of the women in Libria do. But it wasn't until I became a mother, and lived in that role for a while, that I tapped into the most basic of human emotions, the love between a mother and her child. It was then that I stopped taking Prozium.

I worried all the time that you would sense the change in me. But I was also so happy. At first I fell in love with Robbie and Lisa. It was so hard to maintain my composure around them when all I wanted to do was take them in my arms and never let them go. I stopped sleeping at night just so that I could go in and be with them while they slept. I remember you caught me once, kneeling on the floor between their beds just looking at them, and I made something up about being concerned about Lisa taking her dose. After that I had to stop going in at night to see them, because I was afraid that if you caught me in there again it would rouse your suspicion. So I stayed in our room with you. I was used to not sleeping at night by then, so I would lie there and think about the children, wonder what they had done that day at school and what they would do tomorrow.

One day you came home from work with an injury to your leg, where a bullet had grazed your thigh. I had always known that you were good at your job, the best in fact, and it had never even entered my mind that something might happen to you. I felt my blood run cold. I forced myself to freeze and slow everything down. I asked what had happened. You said that you were fine, that there had been an incident in the Nethers but that everyone had been put down. I shivered. _Everyone had been put down_. You said that Errol had sustained a more serious injury, but that he would be fine in a couple of weeks.

"I told him he was getting rusty with Kata 12. Errol never listens." And you smirked. You are of course unaware of this, but you have a slight sense of humor. Seeing that small flicker of emotion in you, coupled with the bloody bandage on your leg made me feel sick.

And then I fell in love with you.

You stayed home for a few days to recuperate and I stayed with you. I tended to your wound and changed the bandages. We had never before had so much physical contact. It was hard for me to maintain myself in a composed state. Sex was something that I had read about in school. It was never something that I thought I would actually want to engage in. Even during my first year off of the Prozium, I hadn't thought about it, because all I could think about were Robbie and Lisa. But now here we were, alone all day, you in a semi-undressed and recumbent state, with me bathing you and treating your hurts. It was maddening. If you were ever going to sense that I was off the dose, it would have been then.

But you didn't. You got well and went back to work. You nodded your head, smiled, and thanked me for my help. There were no more injuries. We were never close like that again. So I watched you sleep at night, and became privy to the fact that you do feel. I saw it during the day in passing moments, but at night when your guard was down I saw that you emoted far more than I could have imagined. I wonder if the roles had been reversed, and it had been you to come off the dose, if you would have been able to hide your emotions from me as well as I have hidden mine from you. I can only pray that I continue to elude you. If you are reading this than there is no doubt that I have been caught and may very well be dead. If it was at your hand please know that it was a risk worth taking and that I love you and our children to the bottom of my very soul.

Viviana

John finished reading the letter. Carefully he folded it and put it into the envelope that Lisa had handed to him yesterday.

"I kept it safe in case you were ever ready," she whispered softly.

He hadn't been able to read it right away. Too many things were coming at him… too much knowledge… his culpability in so many deaths. And now to see the words…ghost's words…what Viviana had wanted him to know. While he knew that her sentiment was different, more personal, the message that was screaming in his head was this: that the reason that he was so good at his job finding and killing sense offenders, was because in essence he was one. A natural. Even while on the Prozium.

Had he known that Viviana was a sense offender? No. But she was right. He had felt things. Now that he was off Prozium, and he was feeling, he could remember and recognize feelings from the past. Concern for Robbie and Lisa. Tenderness for Viviana. It was his feeling on an unconscious level that had probably prevented him from intuiting that each member of his family was a sense offender. Whenever he had consciously sensed the emergence of emotion in himself…he increased his dose. He had nearly doubled it when they took Viviana. He shivered when he remembered the composed, emotionless look on his face on the surveillance video of her sentencing.

Rage boiled inside of him. What must she have thought of him, standing behind her and doing nothing?! She had believed that he possessed feelings…and he did nothing to save her. He had drugged himself, so that he would not have to deal with the pain of losing her, even though he was barely aware of where the pain was coming from, or why he felt it.

"Cleric."

"Yes."

"We need you to come down to the conference room… they are getting ready to broadcast the first informational bulletin since the uprising and we need a spokesperson."

"Yes."

"That would be you, Cleric."

John closed his eyes for a moment. He had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of sense offenders and members of the underground over the course of his career. And now he was their spokesperson. He smirked and murmured to himself.

"Slight sense of humor, indeed."


End file.
